[Wiki Loves Monuments] Tool to add Coordinates

[Jeremy Baron]

Hi,

tl;dr: That tool needs to be disabled immediately. It may be possible
to "fix" it to give very clear (and accurate!) warnings about the
impending sharing of their data before the sharing takes place but
IMHO making sure the wording clear and accurate will take too long
(i.e. more than 5 mins) and we should first disable the tool
completely while/if that wording is developed.

On Sat, Sep 14, 2013 at 6:53 PM, Jan Ainali <jan.ainali at wikimedia.se> wrote:
> Even if Google maps would be okay, why can we not use OSM as the underlying map?
>
> I would rather see the tool rebuilt upon something in our spirit if it is technically possible rather than us lazily accepting a non-free tool.

Well regardless, it seems very, very likely that this is not compliant
with the WMF privacy policy. Maybe a case could be made that all use
of google maps on the projects would violate privacy policy but this
case is worse than that (originally based on a cursory reading of the
source code but now I've also tested it first hand; still limited
because I don't understand hy (or even its alphabet)):

There are links created with the text "Ավելացնել կոորդինատ" (google
translate makes me think that means approximately "add [a]
coordinate(s)") and clicking that will load the google JS. There
appears to be no warning to the user that their data will be shared
with google when they click that link and I believe this is a clear
violation of the WMF privacy policy as currently implemented. see [0]
for links I found where you can try this yourself.

I'll let legal and others comment on the more general case of "can
google maps be used at all" (even if there is prior warning to the
user). And I agree with the policy (non-legal) position (which seems
to be the point of Jan's message) of heavily favoring FLOSS where we
can control the whole stack instead the non-free (e.g. Google Maps).

I'm also not addressing the licensing issues beyond to say that
1) it does need to be carefully evaluated by knowledgeable people
(i.e. that have researched this before today) from OSM, Wikidata
(Katie?), and maybe legal. (Luis?) and
2) "usable on Wikipedia" is IMHO not always the right standard for us
to use. There are some cases where we may want to be able to
collaborate with other projects like OSM or Wikidata (CC0) and so we
have to coordinate with them to see if our actions will complicate or
disrupt collaboration.

-Jeremy

[0] Took a bit of digging but I was able to dig up an example to try
first hand. (why didn't you link to one in your initial post??)

https://hy.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D4%BC%D5%82%D5%80_%D5%BA%D5%A1%D5%BF%D5%B4%D5%B8%D6%82%D5%A9%D5%B5%D5%A1%D5%B6_%D6%87_%D5%B4%D5%B7%D5%A1%D5%AF%D5%B8%D6%82%D5%B5%D5%A9%D5%AB_%D5%A1%D5%B6%D5%B7%D5%A1%D6%80%D5%AA_%D5%B0%D5%B8%D6%82%D5%B7%D5%A1%D6%80%D5%B1%D5%A1%D5%B6%D5%B6%D5%A5%D6%80%D5%AB_%D6%81%D5%A1%D5%B6%D5%AF

links to

https://hy.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D4%B1%D5%BC%D5%A1%D5%BB%D5%A1%D5%B1%D5%B8%D6%80%D5%AB_%D5%BA%D5%A1%D5%BF%D5%B4%D5%B8%D6%82%D5%A9%D5%B5%D5%A1%D5%B6_%D6%87_%D5%B4%D5%B7%D5%A1%D5%AF%D5%B8%D6%82%D5%B5%D5%A9%D5%AB_%D5%A1%D5%B6%D5%B7%D5%A1%D6%80%D5%AA_%D5%B0%D5%B8%D6%82%D5%B7%D5%A1%D6%80%D5%B1%D5%A1%D5%B6%D5%B6%D5%A5%D6%80%D5%AB_%D6%81%D5%A1%D5%B6%D5%AF_%28%D5%84%D5%A1%D6%80%D5%BF%D5%A1%D5%AF%D5%A5%D6%80%D5%BF%D5%AB_%D5%B7%D6%80%D5%BB%D5%A1%D5%B6%29

which in turn has links with the text "Ավելացնել կոորդինատ"